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Who would have thought that there’d come a day when 1MIL would officially “not be what it used to be”. According to Yahoo, it happened a while back because the new elite number is 10MIL minimum! How can this be, and how much further are we going to have to climb with inflation?

“The tool-and-die man figured he was retiring rich. After selling an Arizona business that he’d built up over 30 years, he retreated to a 30-acre spread on the coast of Oregon and handed a $10 million investment portfolio to a big, New York-based private-banking outfit. The bank, however, seemed less than impressed.

Over three years, he says, he received nary a phone call from the reps in the local office. “There was no ‘How are you doing?’ or ‘Maybe you should buy this’ or ‘How about some concert tickets in Portland?’ There was nothing at all.” The retiree eventually reached an inescapable conclusion: “I was considered insignificant.”

Boy, I gotta be honest, I’d be happy to reach that “inescapable conclusion” and even more so to be considered “that insignificant”.

Thinking of it on a lower (my) level, even at bringing in a meager 3% in a mediocre high yield savings account you’re still making 300k a year off interest. I could maybe make ends meet off that, but we need to keep remembering where this conversation is at, which is steps above 300k a year.

“Thanks to a global explosion of wealth over the past 10 years or so, the number of U.S. households with $1 million to $25 million in net worth has more than doubled. Households with $500 million and up have roughly tripled. “Heck, $1 billion isn’t a lot of money,” says Bill Sanderson, a broker of mega yachts in Palm Beach, Fla.

Even if he’s a little jaded from all his dealings with zillionaires, Sanderson could be on to something: Billionaires now occupy every slot on the Forbes 400, and that list, some bankers and consultants say, may be overlooking at least 100 billionaires-next-door whose financial dealings are too private to track.”

I’m pretty sure I don’t live next to any billionaires next door, but there are several good PF’ers on the blogosphere that are planning to get there!

“The rule of thumb, she says, is that you can buy a home that costs about a third of your net worth, assuming you don’t want too much of your fortune concentrated in your home. She believes the “true rich” of Manhattan have net worths of $100 million, allowing them to comfortably buy $30 million Park Avenue apartments with several bedrooms.”

You never know when a spare $30MIL is going to come in handy for that swanky apartment. It’s funny, because clearly these folks must have a thought process that they don’t need to invest. When you think about it, they don’t. They can PAY someone to do that for them with a good chunk of change.

American Express offers the truly rich a Centurion card with such perks as zero-gravity flights with astronaut Buzz Aldrin. A person with $500 million in net worth could charge $10 million to the card for some gambling in Monaco.

Wow, I would guess that NONE of those cards have ever seen the card slider at Costco. :)  Any other outrageous rich folks stories out there?

photos by: mil8, yakobusan

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